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[Illustration:  Vicar. “AND WHAT WERE YOUR SENSATIONS WHEN YOU WERE STRUCK?”

Wounded Tommy. “WELL, IT WAS LIKE WHEN THE MISSIS COPS YEH BEHIND THE EAR WITH A FLAT-IRON—­YOU KNOW.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS.)

I have often pitied the lot of the costume novelist, faced with the increasing difficulty of providing fresh and unworn trappings for his characters.  Therefore with all the more warmth do I congratulate those seasoned adventurers, AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE, on their acumen in discovering such a setting as that of Wolf-lure (CASSELL).  The name alone should be worth many editions.  Nor do the contents in any sort belie it.  This remote country of Guyenne, a hundred years ago, with its forests and caves and subterranean lakes, with, moreover, its rival wolf-masters, Royal and Imperial, and its wild band of coiners, is the very stage for any hazardous and romantic exploit.  It should be added at once that the authors have taken full advantage of these possibilities.  From the moment when the wandering English youth who tells the tale wakes on the hillside to find himself contemplated by a lovely maiden and a gigantic wolf-hound, the adventure dashes from thrill to thrill unpausing.  One protest however I must utter.  The conduct of the young and lovely heroine (as above) and her single-minded devotion to her lover may be true to nature, but somewhat alienated my own sympathies, already given to the first-person-singular English lad who also adored her, and whom both she and her chosen mate treated abominably.  To my thinking, unrequited devotion has no business in a tale of this sort.  Realistic pathos may have its Dobbin or Tom Pinch, but the wild and whirling episodes of tushery demand the satisfactory finish hallowed by custom.  With this reservation only I can call Wolf-lure about the best adventure-novel that the present season has produced.

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Since the opening pages of Calvary Alley (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) are concerned with choir-boys and a cathedral and a rose-window, things to which one gives, without sufficient reason, an association exclusively of the Old World, I was a little startled, as the action proceeded, by the mention of cops and dimes and trolly-cars.  Of course this only meant that I had forgotten, ungratefully, the country in which any story by ALICE HEGAN RICE might be expected to be laid.  Anyhow, Calvary Alley proves an admirable entertainment, a tale of a girl’s expanding fortunes, from the grim slum that gives its name to the book, through many varied experiences of reform schools, a bottling factory and membership of the ballet, up to the haven of matrimony.  Through them all, Nance, the heroine, carries a very human and engaging personality, so that one